Steps in the right direction should be taken a little higher next time

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Vincent Brown was almost gone. He had the ball in his grasp, the end zone in his sights, and nothing between him and the goal line but blades of grass.

“I thought I had a free lane,” San Diego State's foremost receiver said after last night's 38-28 loss to Brigham Young. “The safety basically dove in and clipped my ankle . . .

“I should have started high-stepping, picked my feet up. I didn't know where the safety was.”

Were football helmets equipped with rear-view mirrors, Brown might have anticipated Brigham Young's Scott Johnson bearing down from his port side. He might have raised his knees, or changed his route or made a cut that would have delivered a go-ahead touchdown.

Instead, Brown was tripped up by a shot-in-the-dark one-handed tackle 12 yards from the goal line. Brown would gain 41 yards on the play, but lost an opportunity he could not regain in a game that was then tied at 14-14. Three plays later, Johnson picked off a pass in the end zone to launch a Cougars touchdown drive.

“That's a 14-point difference,” Johnson said after the 10-point game.

This BYU victory was more convincing on the stat sheet than on the scoreboard. It's hard to compete in college football when your defense yields 512 yards of total offense, no matter how potent your passing game.

Yet for a few fleeting moments last night at Qualcomm Stadium, the Aztecs were right there. They would lead, 14-7, two plays into the second quarter, and they could have broken the 14-14 tie had Vincent Brown been able to elude Scott Johnson midway through the period.

“I think I just got his heel,” Johnson said, standing in a corridor outside the Cougars' dressing room. “You see, I tried to swipe his heel so it would hit into his other leg, an elementary sort of thing, really.”

When asked how often that technique actually works, the Eagle scout shrugged.

“I'm not sure,” he said. “I've never had to do it before “

Brady Hoke, the Aztecs' first-year coach, would find little consolation in the wake of his fourth loss in six games. He complained that his players did not play with enough intensity or confidence and, in summation, called the contest “embarrassing.”

But despite the lopsided nature of this rivalry, and of the demonstrable superiority of the other side, the Aztecs got the ball back with 5:27 to play just seven points down.

By the recent standards of this series, this was a real ballgame, one that was still in doubt even after the beer sales were stopped. If that doesn't qualify as a moral victory — and it doesn't — neither should it be classified as an embarrassment.

Except when there's a safety bearing down from the blind side, baby steps are not such a bad thing.

“They did a nice job of using max protecting and running through our zones,” BYU coach Bronco Mendenhall said. “They were able to hold onto the ball long enough to outrun us. I was impressed with the wide receivers and the quarterback (Ryan Lindley), and their ability to move with the extra protection as we covered them.”